It was not vileness that I loved (here my reason remained fully intact), but rather, the ecstasy I derived from the tormenting awareness of having fallen so low that was so gratifying.
Love of depravity, and the shame of having that love. That is his moral carnality, which nobody including the reader never truly came to know until now. Stavrogin is in equal parts a sadist and a masochist.
(Mitya Karamazov has a similar affliction, though without the sadism. Pyotr Verkhovensky has no such affliction - he's an atheist like Kirillov and his gods are Ivan Tsarevich and the revolution. That, and general disconnect from society, which is a similarity he has with the older Verkhovensky in spirit.)
